William Jensen is the author of the novel Cities of Men, which has been called “deeply moving and complex.”

William Jensen has been a landscaper, a construction worker, a dishwasher, a groundskeeper, and a teacher. His short fiction has appeared in various literary journals. He has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. Mr. Jensen is currently the editor of Southwestern American Literatureand Texas Books in Review.

To read an exercise about bridging between scenes in a novel, inspired by Jensen’s Cities of Men, click here.

In this interview, Jensen discusses invisible first lines, the inspiration of Richard Stark and Thomas Harris, and pushing characters into situations where they must act in ways that contradict their tendencies.

Michael Noll

There are moments in the novel when you flash forward into the narrator’s present tense–moments when he’s reflecting back on the events of the novel and in the time between its end and when he tells the story. What was your strategy for these? When did you know when to include them?

William Jensen

There really wasn’t any “strategy.” At least not in the first draft. I relied a lot on instinct to know when to have the narrator reflect. I tend to write a lot in the first person, and when I do this I mentally slip on that character’s skin and think about why this person is even telling the story—why these events are important, what he hopes to express to his audience. I tend to think of everything I write as having an invisible first line that goes, “This is what changed everything.” So I keep that in mind. I’m trying to explore how these incidents, this story, changed the course of life for a particular character or characters. After a while you can really hear your characters, and I listened my protagonist’s voice as he guided me along. There are times to zig and times to zag, times to stay in the scene and times to get deep into a character’s thoughts, so during revision I asked myself if I needed more or less reflection to earn an emotional impact. It’s important for me to have my characters move on after I’ve set the pencil down.

Michael Noll

You and I both attended the MFA program at Texas State and took classes with Tom Grimes, who likes to talk about how stories and novels need a ticking clock. Your book introduces that clock at the end of the first chapter, which ends with the words “my mother disappeared.” Did you always know what the clock (and, therefore, the frame) of the novel would be? How long did it take you to figure it out?

William Jensen

William Jensen’s debut novel, Cities of Men, tells the story of a boy whose mother disappears, leaving him to search for her with a father who may not want to find her.

Honestly, it’s hard for me to remember. Novels take years to write, and I tend to get a little lost along the way and go down rabbit holes and come across subplots that work or have to be entirely cut. I think the clock for me was more in the opening line, “I saw my father get into only two fights.” Since the beginning chapter is about the first fight, the rest of the book is a countdown to the second (and final) rumble. I’m not sure how I actually even came up with that now, I think I just heard the line in my head and wrote it down. By the time I had the first chapter drafted, I knew I had a clock and Tom would be proud. I wonder if he’s read it.

Michael Noll

The search for the mother defines the book, but it’s not a police procedural or really any sort of detective novel. It has some moments where clues lead to investigations, but they happen quickly. I wonder what this novel looked like in its early stages, when you figuring out what direction the story would go and which characters it would focus on. Were you ever tempted to lean more heavily on the conventions of the mystery/thriller genre?

William Jensen

No, I was never that interested in those conventions. Obviously, my characters have a clear and distinct conflict, which is a missing person. And this could have become a thriller if the characters were a little different—a bit harder, darker—or if I was just a different type of writer. I did have some scenes in the first draft that were slightly inspired by Richard Stark’s stuff, but these felt out of place and didn’t ring true—however I admit I love writing those types of scenes. I enjoy mysteries and thrillers. I am a big fan of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris is excellent. There’s a reason why David Foster Wallace used to teach it. I like the Jesse Stone novels by Robert B. Parker a lot. Jim Thompson’s The Grifters is a total masterpiece. Some of those books are incredibly tight. Though I tend to have crime and violence in my fiction, my first and main concern is writing about devastating moments in the lives of ordinary people.

Michael Noll

There are a few big fights in the novel, and what’s interesting is that those scenes keep going even after the fight ends. The focus becomes less on what the fight was about or who won and more about what happens afterward. I suppose that’s really what the entire novel is about. Did you always intend to write those fight scenes in this way, or was it a case of discovering what you had as you were writing it?

William Jensen

I’d have to say it was a combination of both. Like a lot of guys, I got into my share of scrapes as a boy, luckily nothing serious, but regardless of how it ended—in tears or friendship—it was never like the fights I saw on television or the movies. It was always messier, more chaotic…and a lot more sad. Pain hurts. And pain is scary. I knew from the start that the father figure would get into some fights yet he wasn’t a violent guy, and I wanted to explore that. I’ve always been fascinated by the stories where characters are pushed into situations where they’re forced to act in a contradictory way. The more I wrote about the father, the son, the more I was able to meditate on them and their own views of violence, too. So I knew where things were going, I just didn’t know how it would get there. But that’s writing. Buy the ticket. Take the ride.

Like this:

William Jensen’s debut novel, Cities of Men, tells the story of a boy whose mother disappears, leaving him to search for her with a father who may not want to find her.

When you move from writing short stories to writing a novel, you quickly realize that the novel’s length means that one or two hard-hitting scenes can’t carry it. More is needed. Each scene must immediately suggest another scene, again and again, until the end. In a way, it’s the opposite of the famous epiphany ending we all learned when reading Joyce’s “Araby”—the concluding sentence to a scene that makes us all grab our hair and sigh. In a novel, a scene must resist epiphany, even if it’s tone and momentum seem to be taking it toward that sort of ending.

A great example of how to create a bridge to the next scene in a novel can be found in William Jensen’s novel Cities of Men. You can read the opening pages here.

How the Novel Works

The novel’s opening chapter begins, “I saw my father get into only two fights” and then proceeds to tell us about one of them, a fight in a grocery store parking lot. The father and his wife have bought their son, the novel’s narrator, ice cream, and their father is walking back to the car when he hears an argument between a man and woman in another car. He steps in, and a fight ensues. The scene is well written and clearly memorably for the narrator, who observes not just the fight but the ways it could have played out but did not—and also his mother’s reaction and the weather. He’s beginning to place himself in the universe, the sort of coming-of-age moment that naturally builds to an Araby-like concluding line: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” But that’s not what Jensen does because Cities of Men is a novel, not a short story.

Instead, the scene ends like this:

I ran to my room. Seeing Dad cry scared me more than the night’s violence. But I couldn’t tell you why. I pulled the sheets up to my collar. I dug my face into my pillow, closed my eyes, and tried not to think.

I saw Dad fight only one other time. And that wouldn’t happen until four years later, shortly after my mother disappeared.

The ending line echoes the first line of the novel, which is no coincidence. I don’t know which one was written first, and it doesn’t matter. At some point, Jensen knew that there would be a second fight and that the mother, who is so present in this opening scene, would leave, and so the scene is written to introduce both of those elements. Naturally, we want to know more. It’s the last two sentences that do the important work, veering away from epiphany to what-happens-next.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s create a bridge between scenes in a novel, using Cities of Men by William Jensen as a model:

Write the scene you want to write. It’s the thing that likely drew you to this story, and so don’t give it short shrift. Jensen’s opening chapter, minus the first and last lines, could be a quick short story, almost flash fiction. It has its own narrative arc and emotional impact—which is good. If you have a scene like this in mind, one that you’ve been writing in your head for years or one that you’ve written and don’t know what to do with, let it be itself. Don’t run away from the story you want to tell.

Take away or add something. Play a simple what-if exercise with your scene. What if something essential to the scene was taken away? Or, what if something new and burdensome was added? You’re not subtracting or adding to the scene itself but to what comes next. Jensen takes the mother away at the end, after the scene has wrapped up. It’s a simple move that provides the foundation for the entire novel: establish the emotional relationships in the novel and then mess them up. What can you subtract from or add to your scene in the scene that follows?

Be explicit about the addition or subtraction. I may have said this so many times that I’m beating a dead horse, but there’s nothing wrong with coming out and being direct with your readers—especially if being direct forces you to be direct with yourself about your characters’ motivations. Jensen could not be any more explicit unless he wrote, “Then my mother disappeared.” Actually, that’s basically what he writes, only more artfully. And it’s great. Save your nuance and subtlety for the moments in between big, plot-changing sentences. Make those sentences hard-hitting. Tell the reader what you’ve added or subtracted.

The goal is to turn any scene in a novel into a bridge to the next scene.